Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking

Description

A 1930s collection of more than 300 recipes from South Carolina housewives and the African American cooks they employed

First published in 1930 as 200 Years of Charleston Cooking, this collection of more than three hundred recipes was gathered by Blanche S. Rhett from housewives and their African American cooks in Charleston, South Carolina. From enduring favorites like she-crab soup and Hopping John to forgotten delicacies like cooter (turtle) stew, the recipes Rhett collected were full of family secrets but often lacked precise measurements. With an eye to precision that characterized home economics in the 1930s, Rhett engaged Lettie Gay, director of the Home Institute at the New York Herald Tribune, to interpret, test, and organize the recipes in this book.

Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking is replete with southern charm and detailed instructions on preparing the likes of shrimp with hominy, cheese straws, and sweet potato pie not to mention more than one hundred pages of delightful cakes and candies.

In a new foreword, Rebecca Sharpless, professor of history and author of Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960, provides historical and social context for understanding this groundbreaking book in the 21st century.

Sujets

• Cuisine
• La cuisine et son histoire
• Social History
• HISTORY
• Budín
• América
• Ingredient
• Waffle iron
• Bread crumbs
• Southern States
• Egg white
• Cookbook
• Baking powder
• Cornmeal
• Pudding
• Sunday roast
• Recipe
• Salad
• Mayonnaise
• Sweet potato
• Tablespoon
• Cooking
• Bread
• Flour
• American
• Pouding
• Dessert
• Mayonnaise (homonymie)
• Meringue

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 08 juin 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781643361994
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Two Hundred YEARS of Charleston COOKING
ALSO AVAILABLE

An Antebellum Plantation Household: Including the South Carolina Low Country Receipts and Remedies of Emily Wharton Sinkler , edited by Anne Sinkler Whaley Leclercq
The Carolina Housewife , Sarah Rutledge
Carolina Rice Cookbook in The Carolina Rice Kitchen: The Africa Connection , Karen Hess
A Colonial Plantation Cookbook: The Receipt Book of Harriott Pinckney Horry, 1770 , edited by Richard J. Hooker
Charleston Recollections and Receipts: Rose P. Ravenel s Cookbook , edited by Elizabeth Ravenel Harrigan
Two Hundred YEARS of Charleston COOKING
RECIPES GATHERED BY
Blanche S. Rhett
AND EDITED BY
Lettie Gay
with an Introduction and Explanatory Matter by
HELEN WOODWARD
Foreword to 1976 Edition by
ELIZABETH VERNER HAMILTON
New Foreword by
REBECCA SHARPLESS
Foreword to the 1976 edition by Elizabeth Verner Hamilton
1976 University of South Carolina
New foreword by Rebecca Sharpless
2021 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.uscpress.com
Manufactured in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-64336-198-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-1-64336-199-4 (ebook)
Editor s note, 2021
The 1931 edition of Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking , reproduced here in facsimile, includes a racial slur that was in common use at that time. Today we understand such slurs to be tools of dehumanization and oppression, and we do not condone their use in our publications.
Contents
Foreword to the New Edition by Rebecca Sharpless
Foreword to the 1976 Edition by Elizabeth Verner Hamilton
How This Book Came To Be by Helen Woodward
Tried and Found Good by Lettie Gay
SOUPS AND CANAP S
SHELLFISH AND FISH
PILAUS, EGG DISHES AND OTHER MAIN DISHES
POULTRY AND DRESSINGS
STUFFINGS
MEATS
SWEET POTATOES, RICE AND GREEN VEGETABLES
SALADS AND RELISHES
BREADS
CAKES AND CANDIES
DESSERTS
BEVERAGES
Index
Foreword to the New Edition
The food of Charleston has been special since the city s founding in 1670. In a seaport of great wealth, affluent Charlestonians had the best, most cosmopolitan food in North America. In the place where perhaps 100,000 people stolen from Africa and brought to America landed, talented African Americans, such as the enslaved cook Sans Foix, and free Blacks like pastry chefs Sally Seymour and Camilla Dunstan, brought decades of sophisticated cookery to the tables of elite White people.
The luster of Charleston began to fade, however, and after the Civil War, the old city and its residents struggled to get by. To reassert their relevance, White Charlestonians learned to present a slanted view of a glorious past: not only the lost Confederate cause but also the luxurious lives on the storied Lowcountry rice plantations. Through visual art, literature, and historic preservation, they constructed a beautiful, ghostly memory. In this vision of the past, they deliberately omitted the legacy of slavery, in which enslaved South Carolinians outnumbered free: the unremitting toil of plantation life, the cruelty, the sales of human beings.
Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking fits perfectly into this reconstruction of a mythic past, serving up an oversimplified vision of lavish meals that appeared as if by magic, with scant acknowledgment of the enslaved people who created the wealth and did the cooking. And yet at the same time, it is a complicated book. It reveals not only life in the Lowcountry in the late 1920s but also shows how outsiders packaged and peddled southern culture to a national audience.
Two Hundred Years was from the start the product of northern sensibilities, literally married to those of the South. Helen Rosen Woodward (1882-1960) was born in New York City to Jewish European immigrant parents but in 1913 married William Edward Woodward, a native of Saluda County, South Carolina, between Augusta and Columbia. Helen Woodward arrived in Charleston in the late 1920s, one of the hordes of tourists who came to enjoy America s Most Historic City. She had had a remarkable career as an early female advertising executive and published a nationally acclaimed memoir, Through Many Windows , in 1926. In Charleston, Woodward stayed in a small house owned by Blanche Salley Rhett behind Rhett s antiques shop on Church Street. Woodward recalled that when she broached the idea of sending Charleston recipes to friends, Rhett immediately seized on the idea: You write books, why don t you make a book of our recipes? I will get you the recipes from my friends and from my own household. The collected recipes were sent to the test kitchens of the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. The home economists there, under the leadership of Lettie Gay, standardized the measurements and procedures for the recipes (although they were unable to get a whole calf s head, live terrapin, or alcohol for testing). Woodward wrote the essays framing the recipes.
Woodward published a series of teaser articles in the Herald Tribune . The December 29, 1929, article, featuring recipes for plum pudding and apple charlotte, bore the spicy headline, Go South for Dessert: Charlestoners, Till Now, Have Been Chary of Giving Away Their Traditional Recipes. Only a Fear That Modernity May Entirely Wipe Out the Goodness of Their Old-Fashioned Cookery Makes Them Offer These Treasured Dishes for Publication. The first edition of Two Hundred Years appeared in May 1930, selling for $2.50, from New York publisher Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith. In 1931, the New York-based Associated Press distributed nationwide a story on the book, saying that many of the prized recipes were taken verbally from old-time negro cooks, and that Rhett found that many an old southern mammy has guarded with jealous care her secret formula for preparing certain delectable dishes, even refusing to tell it on her dying day. (The names of those mammies do not, however, appear in the book.) The article applauded Rhett for obtaining a large number of original recipes.
In 1976, the University of South Carolina Press published a facsimile with a new introduction by Charleston native Elizabeth Betty Verner Hamilton (1908-2001), the daughter of noted artist Elizabeth O Neill Verner. Hamilton, the well-educated wife of a foreign service officer, lived in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Philippines before returning home. Writing forty-five years after the original publication of the cookbook, Hamilton pointed out interpretive errors made by the northern creators (such as their difficulty in understanding black-eyed peas). She also highlighted changes among White southern women in the twentieth century, inadvertently showing how much her foremothers depended on their African American cooks. White women, she declared, never dreamed of going into a kitchen a generation ago.
As Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking passes its ninetieth birthday, what does a contemporary reader need to know? First, let s look at the people who provided the recipes. While Two Hundred Years elides much of the effort and virtually all the wickedness that went into southern cookery, it gives some credit where credit is due: to the generations of African American cooks who prepared food for their enslavers and employers. Woodward notes the indebtedness of the project to Charleston housewives and their colored cooks, who have contributed the secrets of generations. The selection of recipes features prominently African Americans William Deas and Sally Washington. Twenty-five recipes come from Deas, who cooked for the Rhett family, and five from Washington, who worked for Woodward during her Charleston sojourn.
William Randall Deas Jr. (1896-1961) was the son of Charleston parents born into freedom. (Presumably, his grandparents had been enslaved by the White Deas family, which held many people of African descent.) He served in World War I and married Mattie Gibbs, with whom he had two sons and twin daughters. By 1930, he was working as the butler in the Rhetts imposing house at 116 Broad Street while living nearby on Beaufain Street. The recipes credited to Deas show a sophisticated approach to food, with dishes like stuffed crabs and mushrooms, veal and chestnut stuffing (using the bounty from the hardwood forests to the west), and an assortment of chilled salads, including grapefruit aspic, and tomato and cream cheese aspic, well suited for the Charleston climate. Yet he could turn his hand to traditional southern foods as well: sweet potato pone, corn batter cakes, charlotte russe.
Several women named Sally Washington lived in Charleston in 1930, but the one who most likely worked for Woodward was born in 1876 and in 1930 was residing with her daughter on Burns Lane. Woodward referred to her as old fashioned, with enough energy and character to supply several families. Washington s recipes were true Charleston-okra pilau and red rice-as well as southern: chicken dressing made with stale bread and sweet potato pie with meringue. Washington s simple cookery was, said Woodward, a kind to make one speculate as to whether she was a genius in her own right or whether Charleston was gifted by the gods.
While Woodward compliments Washington, she also inserts the widespread stereotype of African American cookery as something mystical rather than the product of the cook s own knowledge and skill. Similarly, the most patronizing language in the cookbook comes from the Illinois-born recipe editor Gay, who refers to the alleged instinct of an African American cook who know no rules, no measures, who is more likely to conjure her oven than to use a heat control device. She wouldn t know what to do with a thermometer, but by hunches she knows when to take a boiling syrup off the stove. Like other writers o